BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Tragedy of National Complacency

By Walter Russell Mead

Oct. 29, 2003

WHY AMERICA SLEPT

The Failure to Prevent 9/11

By Gerald Posner

241 pages. Random House. $24.95.

Success, it is said, has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan. Gerald Posner's ''Why American Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11'' goes far to prove the opposite: the C.I.A., the F.B.I., Congress, the State Department, the media, the White House, the foreign policy establishment and the general climate of public opinion all contributed to the failure to prevent the devastating mass terror attacks of 2001.

It is very hard for outsiders to judge the reliability of books that claim to give the inside story of secret and dramatic events. Mr. Posner apparently relies heavily on James Woolsey, the former director of central intelligence, for much of his information; other sources would no doubt have given a very different spin to the story. The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. come under heavy criticism; both agencies emerge looking more like the Keystone Kops than elite organizations, but on balance Mr. Posner seems to blame the F.B.I. more.

He writes that some of the C.I.A.'s most serious breaches involved failing to hand over information to the F.B.I. in a timely way. Bureaucratic rivalry was part of the reason, but so, too, was what seemed at times to have been a well-founded fear that the F.B.I. would not use information effectively and might compromise it. Mr. Posner argues convincingly that the F.B.I.'s orientation toward solving crimes rather than preventing them is a major cultural obstacle that will have to be overcome if the F.B.I. is to become more effective in what looks more and more like intelligence and less and less like conventional police work.

Mr. Posner faults what he calls excessive concerns over civil liberties for tying the hands (or intimidating the agents) of law enforcement agencies. It is hard to evaluate these claims fully, but he makes a strong case that whatever happened after 9/11, the pendulum had swung too far in the direction of controlling and limiting the activities of law enforcement and intelligence activities before the attacks. The lesson for civil libertarians here may be that giving law enforcement a little more authority in peacetime will help avoid the sharp pendulum shifts that come after events like the September attacks.

''Why America Slept'' closes with a riveting and disquieting account of the interrogation by American agents of the captured Al Qaeda leader and Osama bin Laden confidant Abu Zubaydah. Winning the wounded Mr. Zubaydah's cooperation by alternately giving and withholding pain medication, the agents succeeded in extracting limited amounts of information.

The trickle turned to a torrent when Mr. Zubaydah was deceived into thinking he was being interrogated by Saudis. He acted like a man delivered into a safe haven and started babbling the names of high-ranking Saudis who he believed would protect him. Once American officials shared this information with the Saudis, the people on the list rapidly began dying under mysterious circumstances before Americans could interrogate them.

The book's greatest defect is its failure to answer the question posed by the title. This is really the story of how America slept: how one agency after another missed obvious clues, concealed information, ignored danger signs. Why we allowed such a culture of failure and mediocrity to grow through so many bureaucracies is another question, and Mr. Posner doesn't really address it.

The answer may have something to do with the widespread American optimism after the fall of the Berlin Wall that history was over, and that the United States had won. Our economic system and our values were triumphant; nobody anywhere on the planet could threaten our security or challenge our ideas. As a result our diplomats, our intelligence agencies and our political leaders grew lax. We could afford to be ''fault tolerant''; we could afford to indulge in pleasant fantasies about the kind of world we lived in.

Mr. Posner calls his book infuriating, and he is right. The level of sheer incompetence repeatedly demonstrated by everyone from senior officials to operatives on the ground makes a dismal story. On the brighter side, the message of ''Why America Slept'' is on balance a hopeful one. Incompetence in our security establishment is something we can address. If such a spectacular and long-running series of failures was necessary to provide the opening the terrorists used on 9/11, then it's not unreasonable to hope that we can defend ourselves much more effectively in the future.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section E, Page 9 of the National edition with the headline: BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Tragedy of National Complacency. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe